IBM spearheads novel heating design, develops and tests it with the LRZ -- a German supercomputing center

International Business Machines, Inc. (IBM) is in hot water with its latest supercomputer design, and that's a good thing. The company announced this week the availability of the world's first hot water commercial supercomputer.

I. Building a Better Cooled Supercomputer

Dubbed LRZ "SuperMUC", the system is composed of IBM System x iDataPlex Direct Water Cooled dx360 M4 servers. It can pack up to 150,000 cores (in 18,000 Intel Corp. (INTC) Xeon processors) for up to 3 petaflops of execution at a time. Describes IBM:

[This] is equivalent to the work of more than 110,000 personal computers. Put another way, three billion people using a pocket calculator would have to perform one million operations per second each to reach equivalent SuperMUC performance.

At the same time, by ditching traditional air cooling for a liquid coolant power costs to be cut by up to 40 percent over a traditional air design. The water is heated to a hotter than normal temperature via special microchannels in the cooling blocks, hence the "hot water" name. The heated fluid gets up to a toasty 113 degrees Fahrenheit, or 45 degrees Celsius, cutting the power consumed by cooling to around a fifth of the levels used in traditional designs.

Of course many tech giants like Facebook, Inc. (FB) and Google Inc. (GOOG) use liquid-coolingat their data centers, but even this somewhat more efficient technology is reportedly inferior to the new hot-water cooling system in power efficiency.

The system is also more compact than traditional air or liquid cooled designs, which require bulkier blowers, piping, and/or heat transfer systems.

II. Trial Deployment in Germany Shows Superb Results

Even greater savings can be realized by repurposing the waste heat from the supercomputer to heat on-site research institutions in the winter. This approach was tested at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum -- LRZ) in Garching near Munich, Germany.

The LRZ, who helped develop the commercial supercomputer technology, not only was able to realize 40 percent power savings, allowing it to fulfill the German government's power efficiency mandates for research institutions, it also saved $1.25M USD on heating costs at the LRZ, via the attached waste-heat recycling system.

Dr. Bruno Michel, manager, Advanced Thermal Packaging, IBM Research cheers, "As we continue to deliver on our long-term vision of a zero emission data center we may eventually achieve a million fold reduction in the size of SuperMUC, so that it can be reduced to the size of a desktop computer with a much higher efficiency than today."

The LRZ saves money by using waste heat from the hot-water cooling system to heat workspaces during the winter. [Image Source: Steve Lionel/Flickr]

This performance will be used to drive a wide spectrum of research -- from simulating the blood flow behind an artificial heart valve, to devise quieter airplanes to unearthing new insights in geophysics, including the understanding of earthquakes. The SuperMUC system is also connected to powerful visualization systems, including a large 4K stereoscopic power wall and a five-sided immersive artificial virtual-reality environment or CAVE for visualizing 3D data sets from fields, including Earth science, astronomy and medicine.

Munich and nearby German cities deeply rely on the Centre's computing resources for their studies. Now they'll be able to do it more affordably, and set an example via a prototype of a design that will likely pop up elsewhere around the world before long, courtesy of IBM.

There comes a point where replacing equipment becomes significantly cheaper than cooling them at a lower temperature. I believe Google keeps its datacenters at a sweltering 72F and use cheap redundant hardware that's easily replaceable. It's cheaper for them to replace a switch here and there than to run the server room at 62F.